Background

Patrick Moore is a Canadian environmentalist, often referred to incorrectly as a founder of Greenpeace[2], who believes that humans are not to blame for global warming. [49] According to a statement by Greenpeace[3], “Patrick Moore frequently portrays himself as a founder or co-founder of Greenpeace, and many news outlets have repeated this characterization. Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace.” [4]

While Moore was a leading figure with Greenpeace Canada, and worked with Greenpeace International between 1981 and 1986, he was not a co-founder of Greenpeace. Moore broke away from Greenpeace after he concluded that “[…] the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism.” [2] Greenpeace contends that “what Moore really saw was an opportunity for financial gain. Since then he has gone from defender of the planet to a paid representative of corporate polluters.” [5]

In 1991, Patrick Moore established a consultancy business called Greenspirit Enterprises[4] “focusing on environmental policy and communications in natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change.” [3]

Moore has also worked for the mining industry, the logging industry, PVC manufacturers, the nuclear industry, and in defense of biotechnology. In October 2008, Greenpeace issued a statement distancing itself from Moore, saying he “exploits long gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson, usually taking positions that Greenpeace opposes.”[5]

Moore is the “chairman and chief scientist” of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd[9]., a PR company that “work with many leading organizations in forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture and plastics, developing solutions in the areas of natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change.”

As of 2014, Moore was listed as a Board Member of NextEnergy[10], a Canadian energy services company. [6]

Moore has been criticized for his relations with “polluters and clear-cutters” through his consultancy and has earned his living since the early 1990s primarily through consulting and publicly speaking for a variety of corporations and lobby groups such as the Nuclear Energy Institute. [7], [8]

Upon being offered some glyphosate to try, Moore refused to take up his own suggestion, ending the interview and telling the filmmaker[13], “I'm not an idiot.” Video below. [52]

Stance on Climate Change

2015

“As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age.” [53]

2007

“We do not know if we are a small or large part of the present global warming. It is not possible through science to determine an exact answer to this question. Certainly the natural factors, and there are many, that have acted to change the climate many times through the history of the Earth, are still operating today. They have not gone away. But human emissions of CO2 is a new (natural) factor. So it is very unlikely that we are the only factor causing the present global warming but we may be one of the factors.” [9]

2006

According to one article, “Moore contended that global warming and the melting of glaciers is positive because it creates more arable land and the use of forest products drives up demand for wood and spurs the planting of more trees. He added that any realistic plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and the emission of so-called greenhouse gases should include increased use of nuclear energy.” [10]

Key Quotes

June, 2016

“The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees.

“Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.

“This extremely positive aspect of human CO2 emissions must be weighed against the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions will cause a catastrophic warming of the climate in coming years.

The one-sided political treatment of CO2 as a pollutant that should be radically reduced must be corrected in light of the indisputable scientific evidence that it is essential to life on Earth.” [45]

October, 2015

“[H]uman emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.” [53]

“To conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.” [53]

March, 2015

If there were no CO2 in the atmosphere there would be no life on this planet. Surely that should be enough to permit questioning the certainty of those who demonize this key molecule. [26]

“I support sustainable forestry, which is sometimes best done by making clearings where new trees can grow in the sun. I have given my reasons for supporting nuclear power, vinyl and genetic engineering in my books, all of which stem from a concern for the environment and human welfare. And is Greenpeace suggesting environmentalists should be against “mining”? Have these people stopped riding bicycles, texting on cell phones, typing on laptops, and riding mass transit? How could they say anything more ridiculous?” [11]

January, 2010

3:08-3:48 “You see people should, sort of, wake up to the fact that the climate stopped warming more than 10 years ago. Nineteen ninety-eight was the warmest year we’ve had in the last 100 years. Since then there’s been a slight cooling trend. Yes, the Arctic ice was lowest in 2007 in any summer since we started measuring it, only in 1979, so we don’t really have a very long dataset here, but for the last two years it has been rebuilding. Antarctica never did get warm, it has remained cold and the sea ice around Antarctica has not shrunk in the slightest, and you can find this easily on the Internet.” [21]

7:35-8:13 “I think it is crazy for Al Gore to suggest that in 10 years from now, we will not be using any fossil fuels. That is apparently his goal, and politicians of the world over are clambering over each other to make more wildly ridiculous promises about 80% reduction in fossil fuels or a carbon neutral world. Personally, I do not think a carbon neutral world is feasible: Not with this many people, and not if people are going to bring themselves out of poverty in the developing countries. It’s just not going to happen, and maybe it isn’t necessary to have a carbon neutral world.” [21]

“If the Paris climate accord is ratified, or enforced locally by compliant governments, it will strangle the leading economies of the world with pointless carbon taxes and costly climate and energy policies, all with no sound basis in evidence or science […]” [63]

June 7, 2016

Patrick Moore released a new report at the Frontier Center for Public Policy titled “The Positive Impact Of Human CO2 Emissions On The Survival Of Life On Earth.”[21] According to the press release, the report “highlights scientific literature that is often ignored in mainstream discussions about climate change policies.” That is, it is humanity's role to emit as much carbon dioxide as possible to ensure the continued survival of the planet: [46]

“This paper serves as a discussion about the role of atmospheric CO2 in the maintenance of life on Earth and the positive role of human civilization in preventing CO2 from trending downward to levels that threaten the very existence of life.” [46]

According to the FCPP's report description[22] and executive summary, “life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now” without man-made CO2 emissions: [47]

“It is calculated that if the decline in CO2 levels were to continue at the same rate as it has over the past 140 million years, life on Earth would begin to die as soon as two million years from now and would slowly perish almost entirely as carbon continued to be lost to the deep ocean sediments.

The combustion of fossil fuels for energy to power human civilization has reversed the downward trend in CO2 and promises to bring it back to levels that are likely to foster a considerable increase in the growth rate and biomass of plants, including food crops and trees.

Human emissions of CO2 have restored a balance to the global carbon cycle, thereby ensuring the long-term continuation of life on Earth.” [47]

Patrick Moore's full report (PDF) is available online. The following is excerpted from the report's conclusion: [45]

“[H]uman emissions are restoring a balance to the global carbon cycle by returning some of the CO2 back to the atmosphere that was drawn down by photosynthesis and CaCO3 production and subsequently lost to deep sediments. This extremely positive aspect of human CO2 emissions must surely be weighed against the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are mainly responsible for the slight warming of the climate in recent years and will cause catastrophic warming over the coming decades” [45]

CDR Communications[47] was behind the 2010 video by the Cornwall Alliance[48] titled Resisting the Green Dragon, which claimed environmentalism was a “false religion” and a “global government” power grab. Chris Rogers of CDR Communictions is also chairman of The James Partnership[49], the umbrella arm that includes the Cornwall Alliance as one of its projects and pays the salary of Calvin Beisner[50], Cornwall’s founder and spokesperson. [57]

“We are putting together what I think is the most comprehensive, unique, entertaining and humorous climate documentary that has ever been done or attempted,” Morano had said[52] before the film was released. [60]

“The reason that this is a unique film,” Morano has said, “is that we are going for a pop culture-friendly… sarcastic approach and we actually give both sides in this movie.”

In an interview with Ezra Levant, Morano said:

“I am not interviewing a lot of the main climate sceptical scientists because I feel like they have been interviewed by many other people and their stories have been told. I am trying to find another layer of scientist whose stories have not been out there yet. You will see a lot of new names in this.” [60]

According to the event description, “Members of the CO2 Coalition and many other experts argue that carbon dioxide enrichment of the atmosphere provides manifold benefits for humanity. And observed surface warmings are much smaller than predicted by climate models. Economic models that fail to include the benefits of CO2 and the serious exaggerations of climate models and are being used to advocate “cures” that are much worse than the non-existent disease.” [40]

“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.

“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.

“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.

“Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said. [[75]31]

Critics have suggested the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is influenced by donations from a relatively small group of corporations. For example, the director of Texans for Public Justice has said that [76]“TPPF’s donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies. TPPF is thinking the way its donors want it to think.” [32]

“The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that 'the science is settled' and 'the debate is over',” Moore said.

According to Moore, returning CO2 to the atmosphere is necessary to maintain life on Earth:

“[H]uman emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.” [53]

He concludes that “carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.”

September 3, 2015

Patrick Moore, listing himself as a director of the CO2 Coalition[55] in his signature, wrote an article in the Opinion Pages of Wall Street Journal titled “Obama’s Half-Baked Alaska[78]” where he suggests that there is no need to be worried about glacial ice receding because it has happened in the past. [30]

“All of this happened long before human emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, could have had any impact,” Moore writes. “There is no reason to believe that those factors have suddenly disappeared and now humans are the all-powerful shapers of global climate destiny. Yet this entirely unproven hypothesis of catastrophe is compelling to those who would control our beliefs.”

He continues, stating that “carbon dioxide is essential for all life on Earth, that plants could use a lot more of it, and that the real threat is a cooling of the climate, not the slight warming that has occurred over the past 300 years.” [30]

According to their website, PragerU's mission[87] is to “spread what we call 'Americanism' through the power of the Internet. Our five-minute videos are conservative sound bites that clarify profoundly significant and uniquely American concepts for more than 100 million people each year.” They focus on “Judeo-Christian” values including “freedom of speech, a free press, free markets and a strong military to protect and project those values.” [42]

That's true about life. And it's true about the climate. The climate has been constantly changing since the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago.

For example, in just the past 2000 years, we have seen the Roman Warm Period, when it was warmer than today…Then came the cooler Dark Ages… Followed by the Medieval Warm period, when it was at least as warm as today… Then we had the Little Ice Age – that drove the Vikings out of Greenland. And, most recently, a gradual 300-year warming to the present day. That's a lot of changes. And, of course, not one of them was caused by humans.

During the past 400,000 years there have been four major periods of glaciation – meaning that vast sheets of ice covered a good part of the globe – interrupted by brief interglacial periods. We are in one of those periods right now. This is all part of the Pleistocene Ice Age which began in earnest two and a half million years ago. It's still going on, which means that we are still living in an ice age. That's the reason there's so much ice at the poles. Thirty million years ago the earth had no ice on it at all.

So, then, what about carbon dioxide, the great villain of the Global Warming alarmists? Where does that fit in to this picture? Not as neatly as you might think.

Temperatures and carbon dioxide levels do not show a strong correlation. In fact, over very long time spans – periods of hundreds of millions of years – they are often completely out of sync with each other.

Over and over again, within virtually any time frame, we find the climate changing – for reasons we do not fully understand. But we do know there are many more factors in play than simply the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere – factors such as the shape and size of the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, activity from the sun, and the amount of wobble or tilt in the earth's axis, among many others. Even the relatively short 300-year period from the peak of the Little Ice Age to the present has not been steady. The latest trend has been a warming one, but it began nearly a century before there were significant carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. And, there has been no significant warming trend in the 21st century. Contrary to media headlines, the trend over the past couple of decades has been essentially flat.

Meanwhile human-caused CO2 emissions are higher than ever. About 25 percent of all the CO2 emissions from human sources have occurred during this period of no net warming.

So, what are we in for next? Will the temperature resume an upward trend? Will it remain flat for a lengthy period? Or, will it begin to drop? No one knows. Not even the biggest, fastest computers.

All the information I've presented – the increases, decreases and plateaus in temperature over the ages and into the last centuries – is available to anyone who wants to seek it out. Yet to state these simple facts is to risk being called a “climate change denier.” Not only is that absurd, it's mean-spirited. It's absurd because no one, not even the most fervent skeptic, denies that the climate is changing. And it's mean-spirited because to call someone a climate change denier is to intentionally link them to people who deny the Holocaust. So, maybe it's time to stop the name-calling.

Predicting the climate, one of the most complex systems on earth with thousands of inputs, many of which we don't understand, isn't an exact science, or anything close to it. Maybe it's just a tad arrogant to suggest that we can predict the weather or the climate or just about anything 60 years from now.

The science is not “settled.” The debate is not over. The climate is always changing. It always has. And it always will.

I'm Patrick Moore, Co-Founder of Greenpeace, for Prager University.

March, 2015

Patrick Moore published an opinion/blog piece in The Province[90] where he says that carbon is not pollution, and that instead “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life it is.”

Accoridng to Moore, global warming has paused since 2000. Moore also mentions a common talking point by climate change skeptics that “Contrary to popular belief, at 400 parts per million (0.04 per cent), CO2 is lower now in the atmosphere than it has been during most of the 550 million years since modern life forms emerged during the Cambrian period.”

Here's a breakdown of Moore's main arguments, discussed at Skeptical Science:

Patrick Moore conducts a speaking tour across Australia[94] financed by the Galileo Movement[95], which describes Patrick Moore as “a co-founder of Greenpeace[96],” despite Greenpeace itself contesting that “Patrick Moore did not found Greenpeace[97].” [23] Rex Weyler, a former colleague of Moore's and actual co-founder of Greenpeace International, stated: “Moore has served as a corporate public relations consultant far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace, and he has never worked as a scientist.” [24] Moore's speaking tour includes “one-on-one meetings with news organisations, politicians and business leaders with a mix of public lectures and town hall meetings for the general public throughout Australia,” and it hopes to “have a substantial influence on decision makers in Australia promoting sensible environmental policies.” [25]

October 9, 2014

Patrick Moore attends Amherst College to deliver a presentation titled “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout,” which was put on and paid for by the Amherst College Republicans. [22] Moore argues that “current climate change trends are not particularly dangerous, even if they continue until no permanent ice remains at the North and South poles,” according to The Amherst Student[98], Amherst College's Independent Newspaper. [22] Roughly 20 minutes into Moore's presentation, nearly half of the audience, made up of the Green Amherst Project's members, exited the room in protest of Moore's claims regarding anthropogenic global warming. Moore responded to the protest in a question-and-answer session following his presentation by saying, “fifty people walk out, and I say that's a pretty Taliban thing to do,” and described the protestors as “the real deniers,” and “as having a 'Taliban mindset.'” [22]

DeSmogBlog has done in-depth research on the other speakers and sponsors from Heartland's ICCC9, which can be found here[100].

November 21, 2009

Patrick Moore was a presenter at a TEDx Talk in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he argues against adopting climate polices that will “put hundreds of millions of people into energy poverty,” and recommends “waiting to see what happens,” in terms of climate, because he thinks we don't know what will happen. A video of his presentation can be viewed below [21]:

Patrick Moore wrote a letter to the UK's Royal Society, where he stated that “there is no scientific proof of causation between the human-induced increase in atmospheric CO2 and the recent global warming trend, a trend that has been evident for about 500 years, long before the human-induced increase in CO2 was evident.” [13]

Appeared on Penn & Teller: Bullshit! in episodes Environmental Hysteria (2003) [14] and Endangered Species (2005). [15] Note that the videos are no longer available on YouTube due to a copyright complaint from CBS.